McCaffery: Flyers picked perfect time to start panicking (With Video)

By JACK McCAFFERY

Sunday, March 31, 2013

PHILADELPHIA -- The principles of success in a hockey game, as for those for achievement in a hockey season, are identical: Understand time, situation and when, always when, to play with wild-eyed panic.

So if the Flyers are to salvage something from what once looked like a tragically misspent hockey mini-season, they can credit what they did in a two-victory weekend at the end of March.

If they become a playoff team, or better, they can remember that very moment of panic.

"I think everybody has a good understanding of where we sit and what we are capable of," Peter Laviolette was saying Sunday, before a game against the Washington Capitals. "But I don't think it changes from a week ago or two weeks ago or a month ago: We need to win hockey games. I think guys are ready to play."

The Flyers would win, 5-4, scoring twice in the final 7:12 of regulation, then on Ruslan Fedotenko's goal at 1:34 of overtime, allowing them to finish the night two points south of the playoff line.

They won with captain Claude Giroux refusing to allow a season to fade without a fight. They won with useful goaltending, a well-played timeout and four points from Kimmo Timonen, who hardly looked like he had played in more than 1,000 games.

They won like a championship-minded team would win, at about the time of the season when such teams typically do.

Though the results were not quick to provide supporting evidence, the Flyers started to look more presentable six games ago. That's when they played well enough to dismiss a 4-2 loss in Tampa to ill-fortune. That was followed by a well-played overtime defeat in Pittsburgh, a mess against the Rangers, then an overtime loss to the Islanders. Yet when they defeated Boston, 3-1, Saturday, then won Sunday too, they'd quietly collected six points in those six games, and had gained five of a possible eight points with one game left in a season-defining, five-game homestand.

And because the lockout has given the NHL standings the funhouse-mirror treatment, that somehow had left them in the odd position of being in last place -- yet enthused.

"Fortunately for us, other teams aren't winning that are just above us," said Matt Read, who'd supplied a first-period goal. "So we have to worry about ourselves, keep winning, keep playing good hockey and just find ways to win hockey games."

If the Flyers become a playoff team, they will have a nobody-believed-in-us card to play, just not a platinum version. That's because they were up for a little self-criticism of their own after that recent 5-2 loss to the Rangers, when even Laviolette half-shrugged when asked if there was anything more his team could do.

So the disapproval had been universal, if a touch early. For this is the point in a standard NHL season -- 35 games in for the Flyers -- that the better teams start playing that way.

"We can't be worried about that," Claude Giroux said of the critiques. "We have to be worried about what we have to do. Obviously, there will be people saying negative stuff about us, including (the press). But I know it is part of the business. That's when you have to make sure you block that kind of stuff and do what you have to do on the ice."

The Flyers spilled onto the ice Sunday with the NHL's No. 1 power play, an improving goalie, and a chance. They ended it on a two-game winning streak, and with their third consecutive game with at least a point.

Afterward, Ilya Bryzgalov was asked if it was the kind of victory that can generate momentum.

"I have no idea," he said.

In this odd season, how could anybody? But with 13 games left, the Flyers can go into the playoffs only one way: Hot.

"We are just focusing more on the game and making sure that we are ready to play hockey," said Laviolette said of the playoff chances. "There is less talk about that right now."